The Cooking Blog, part two.

First of all, it is really surreal and kind of stressful to suddenly have to figure out where I am going to live next year when I am back at Wellesley. It seems bizarre to still be dealing with Wellesley paperwork bullshit in the middle of my St. Petersburg apartment. It's really going to fuck with my head when I have to choose and register for classes in the next couple of weeks.

Secondly, this weekend was completely, and wholly uneventful. As was the end of last week, full of midterms and crap. Everyone has had this kind of gross, lethargic cold that has been going around, and by Friday it hit me and I came home and didn't really leave my house all weekend, just watching movies and sitting in my bed. I did finish King, Queen, Knave by Nabokov which I enjoyed, instead of going on the cold, rainy trip to Vyborg on Sunday, once again sleeping through that day trip (same thing happened this summer).

The only time I did leave the house was for a long, painful few hours on Saturday when I had to go into Smolny at 10AM for a make up 16MM class to shoot some film in the freezing, terrible snow. It would have been fun if it hadn't been wet and frigid, and so upon coming home, I was inspired to try making the mushroom soup that Olga always made for me last semester, and, I must say, it wasn't a complete failure.


The recipe goes something as follows:

Chop some mushrooms, a bunch of them, and cook them with butter in a pot on the stove for about 3 minutes.

Add in one whole onion, chopped up, cook a little further with those mushrooms.

Add in a whole bunch of water to the pot.

Add in a bunch of cut up potatoes to the mess on the stove.

Add in some chicken broth mix stuff (as we had no bullion, we used this chicken broth powder that Zhenya, the girl who used to live in my room, had left behind.)

Let the whole mixture boil for a while so the potatoes will cook, then let it simmer until you feel good about it.

See? Not hard at all. A little bland, but that's the way I know and love that soup, plus you can always add pepper and salt and things afterwards to your taste.


The only shame is that soup really does not photograph well.

And then afterwards we made a little pizza too, but we really cheated on that. They sell these really good frozen pizzas at the produkti on our street, so we got the four-cheese variety and just added some frozen spinach and fresh tomato to it before cooking (Lauren's stroke of genius).


But we still cooked it, you know, so it counts.